For better or worse, one-to-many is now the norm, and numerous organizations are jumping on the bandwagon to explore new ways to use social media for added exposure. Unfortunately, with the low cost of entry comes low risk awareness for both individuals and businesses, leading to numerous embarrassing events with serious reputational impact for people and companies alike.

According to a recent Microsoft survey, 57% of people do not consider the downsides of their online behaviour while 11% reported experiencing a variety of negative consequences ranging from being fired to rejection of their mortgage applications.

And indeed, the thought process is not trivial as it involves not only the ability to consider multiple scenarios but has to include a solid baseline of knowledge about the space, which the vast majority of people lacks.

To this end, self-employed people and businesses must consider establishing a ‘Reputational Risk Taxonomy’ and communicate it with their teams before even articulating an online marketing strategy. As such, a classification of risks related to online activity must be distilled and considered central to every activity carried out online. To wit, the following checklist should be a starting point:

1. Who in our organization has personal accounts on social media sites today? Conduct an inventory of all professional information disclosed in such profiles beginning with “name of employer”.
2. Do we currently monitor our online reputation? Google and Microsoft tools can and should be regularly used to monitor the company’s image.
3. Do we have a plan in place to defuse negative factors and limit the reputationally damaging impact of adverse events? Develop a list of social media sites that encourage positive feedback, from specialized sites such as Gri.pe to online giants such as Facebook.
4. Do we have an Emergency Response Team that can rapidly intervene and effectively use tools such as Twitter to deal with the issue before it results in catastrophic damage to the brand, image or company reputation?
5. As part of our Internet activities, we need to monitor our competition’s activities and determine how we can strategically adjust our online initiatives to rapidly respond to potentially damaging moves by other organizations. Do we conduct regular Business Impact Assessments (BIA) to model the resolution and outcome of such adverse scenarios?

Critically, individuals and organizations must have a plan to control, not only disseminate online content so their ability to perform damage control is a documented and tested process ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice. In a mature enterprise, such procedural guidance is part of the Communications Planning function of the Information Security group. These activities often conform to global best practices and have a tangible impact on the organization’s ability to comply with industry standards and applicable legislation.

As with everything else, what once was the realm of the largest firms is now available to the smallest microbusinesses, from customer relationship management (CRM) software to human resource systems (HRMS), from security dashboards to digital rights management and licensing tools. It is no wonder then that given the zero-cost of entry and unlimited potential for global exposure, SMBs are now feeling empowered and competing on par with large enterprises.

Now is therefore the ideal time to adopt not only the exposure strategies of large organizations, but also their risk management techniques so as to be ready to prevent and react to potentially embarrassing or otherwise damaging reputational breaches.

If you don’t do it, no one will do it for you.